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Matt was able to save this update from the jaws of tardiness by kicking my system repeatedly with a steel-toed techboot. He reckons the motherboard is on its way out and may have caused the Windows files on my hard disk to corrupt, but after two days of kicking I was able to work on the comic again with only moderate crashing and no boot failures at all. Hurrah for Matt!
I'm still looking into whether it would be cheaper to replace and upgrade the current system, or buy a new one. Woo.